Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Monday, May 13, 2013

How the Greens Pick Your Pocket

By Alan
Caruba

The famed
Boston Tea Party was a protest against “taxation without representation”, but
our pockets are picked every day by a plethora of taxes of which most Americans
are not even aware.

We get
robbed when the federal government thwarts exploration and extraction of energy
resources that would greatly reduce those costs. We get robbed when the
government (EPA) conspires to force coal-fired plants out of business through
excessive regulation or declares that milk is a form of “oil” to be regulated.

One
particularly egregious form of robbery is ethanol. In March, a Washington Times editorial pointed out that “only the government could come up with a bubble in
a commodity that’s merely speculative…renewable identification numbers are
ethanol production credits created by the Environmental Protection Agency to
help companies meet federal quotes for the production of a fuel that doesn’t
actually exist.”

Not
content with requiring the waste of a basic food product, corn, this other
supposed source of ethanol requires refineries to purchase a “renewable
identification number”, then priced at $1.10, up 500% from the three cents it
would have cost a few months ago. The cost is passed along to everyone filling
up their tank.

The cost
of the corn that is diverted from the dinner table is in the billions and
creates worldwide shortages. Before the Renewable Fuel Standard was imposed,
corn prices were between $2 and $3 per bushel. The price of corn has since
spiked to $7 per bushel and you pay for that at the gas pump and in the
supermarket where corn is an integral element of thousands of food items.

Ethanol is
justified as reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but it creates more as it
is processed for use and it actually reduces the mileage that a gallon of gas
provides. Worse yet, it damages the engines of all new cars and trucks. It is
so corrosive, it cannot be shipped via pipelines. And the EPA wants to increase
the amount of ethanol to be blended from ten percent to fifteen percent!

Not
content with that approach to fending off a global warming that hasnotbeen occurring for the last sixteen
years, the EPA recently proposed a “Tier 3” rule to further lower sulfur
content in gasoline that would increase the refining cost of gasoline by
up to nine cents per gallon.

Reflecting
on Obama administration policies, David Rothbard and Craig Rucker, co-founders
of CFACT, a free market think tank devoted to environmental and development
issues, recently noted that “All of the above” too often means all of the above ground
and little or nothing below the Earth’s surface: wind, solar, biofuels and
wood, for example – but little or no oil, gas, coal or uranium. In fact, more
than any other in history, the Obama administration is using its executive
powers to delay, obstruct, hyper-regulate, penalize and bankrupt the proven
energy that is the foundation of modern living standards.”

The
fleecing of the American taxpayer defies the imagination. The Institute for
Energy Research recently reported that President Obama has spent $11.45 million
for every “green job” created. Since 2009, Obama’s first year in office, the
Department of Energy’s $26 billion loan program has created just 2,298
permanent jobs. The DOE has squandered billions on so-called green energy
companies—solar and wind—whose investors have also turned out to
be heavy contributors to his political campaigns. This is borderline
criminality.

Since 2008
when the housing bubble burst, causing a huge economic downturn that has
created an estimated 26 million unemployed, the Obama administration has gone
about cancelling oil and natural gas leases while at the same time putting an
embargo on the issuance of new leases on all federally owned lands.

The
federal government owns 28% of the land in the nation and a majority of the
land in the energy-rich Western states. It also controls oil and natural gas
leasing on the Outer Continental Shelf, the submerged area between land and
deep ocean.

In sharp
contrast, drilling on privately owned lands has proved to be a bonanza. If the
full capacity of the nation’s technically available reserves of oil and natural
was unleashed, the United States would not only have no need to import oil, but
would become an exporter!

Most
Americans are totally unaware of what the government is doing, but all are
being impacted as the cost of transportation and electricity continues to rise
for no good reason other than government policies and the environmental
propaganda about “climate change” and “pollution.”

The Greek
myth about Cassandra tells of the god Apollo’s gift of prophecy he bestowed on
her to win her affections. When she would not become his lover, he punished her
by causing anyone to hear her prophesies of future events to interpret them as
lies. The gift became a curse.

Think tanks like CFACT and others
are telling Americans the truth, but too many remain deaf to it. The result is our
present torpid economy and the cost of energy and commodities that have been
increased by the lies Greens tell.

1 comment:

The History of the Oregon Environmental Council and a biography of Larry Williams, the mechanism for funding environmental organizations (NGO) was unique.(Pg 168, lulu.com)

First, the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) refers to a policy that, "...allowed each country that participated (Latin America Trade Agreement) to donate to an environmental fund using money that would otherwise go to the US to pay down their debt...the environmental funds to be controlled by WWF...In 1986, through a continuing resolution placed a permanent earmark requiring USAID to spend three percent of its budget on environmental issues." So American taxpayers have been paying for the environmental movement for a long time with Billions of dollars when you take into account the size of the budgets and the debt service that was forgiven to most if not all Latin American countries and USAID.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.